第5章 The Second Note

They took the first watch on a Thursday, because Piet's aunt had four guests and a clock and no opinions, and because the tide tables in the library's local file said the lowest water of the month fell at twenty to three that night. "You have actually read those," Tove said. "I read the ones for the spring tides for six years, and the spring tides are the interesting ones, and yes I have read them, and no, I did not learn that at home, I learned it in a museum." He was crouched at the bottom of the shingle, threading fishing line through a cork. "Fourteen millimetres of nylon, out of the tackle box under the bed. Don't tell my aunt." "She'll find out." "She won't. There is a hole in the mattress." He tied the cork to one end of a twenty-metre coil and set it in the notch where the shingle turned to rock. "The line runs out to the shelf. When the water comes up over the crack, the cork lifts. The bell goes when the cork lifts." "You have thought about this." "Somebody thought about it. Whoever laid those notes in that pool knew the spring tide comes in over that crack at about this time, and that is not something you learn by accident on a beach. You learn it from tables. The tables are in the library, and the library is free." He straightened up. "So whoever is doing this was a person who used the library. That is the first thing we actually know about them, and we did not know it this morning." They sat on the blanket with their backs to the bank and the two trawlers' lights swinging out on the water, and the cold came up through the shingle until Tove could feel it in her teeth. "You never told me why your father sent you here," she said. Piet was quiet for a while. Behind them the sea came in and went and came in again, and the line hissed over the rock. "My mother died in February," he said. "And my father is sixty-one and cannot say the word Tuesday without wincing. He put me on the bus on the eighth of June with a duffel bag and four hundred euros and told me the sea was good for me, which is what people in fishing towns say instead of saying goodbye." He pulled his hood up. "There is a room at the top of the harbour office with a bed in it, and my aunt sleeps on the sofa. I have been here ninety days and I have not been to the cinema, and I have not been swimming, because of the current at the point, which at least four people a day mention without being asked." "Is it good? The sea." "It is very good." He said it flatly, the way you concede a point you have lost. "It is very good and I hate it and I cannot look at it without counting things." At twenty to three the cork lifted. Piet's hand came up flat and hard, stopping Tove in the middle of a breath, and the little brass bell on the line rang four times and then went quiet under the water, and down at the shelf a clear bag came over the rock inside the foam and grounded against the stone with a soft slap, and the slack line went out of sight. Neither of them moved for a long moment. The water came up to the shelf, turned, and began to go. "Go," Piet said. They went. Tove went down the wet shingle on her hands and knees and got a hand on the bag in the last of the foam, and Piet had the light and was already photographing the crack from three angles before she had the paper out. "Sixty-one groups this time," she said. "Smaller than the first." "Shorter sentence." He shone the torch on the paper. "Same hand, same pencil, and look at the pressure on the capitals. Same as the first note. Whoever it is gets nervous at the start." They took it back up the bank and sat in the car park under the single lamp and read it against the 2006 register, which Piet had persuaded Ole to let them take out of the basement on the condition that the cart was back by four. It took him eleven minutes. Tove sat and listened to the numbers go by and felt the exact moment the sentence came together, because he swore, quietly, in something that was not English and possibly not a language at all. "Read it out," she said. He read it out. "The key is worn smooth. The box with the rust is under the floor above your head." Iona Pratt handed them the key at nine the next morning, without a single argument, which frightened Tove far more than a refusal would have. "You have a note telling you to ask me for it," she said. "Which means somebody has worked out that I am the lock and the keeper and the door, all at once, and I have been all three for thirty-one years, and I have not enjoyed any of it." She took a flat iron key off the chain around her neck, where it had been living since 1995, and put it into Tove's palm. It was worn absolutely smooth. "Second door on the landing. And do not take the blotter off the desk, it is mine." "Mrs. Pratt—" "Go up. Take your shoes off at the bottom of the stairs. There is no point in ruining the floor as well as the archive." The room at the top of the library stairs had been shut since before she came, and it was exactly as cold as the basement and exactly as still. Thirty years of dust lay over the six tables in a grey blanket, with one clean rectangle in the middle of it where a box had been set down and lifted again. There was a lamp on the middle table with a full bulb in it and a switch that shone with handling. The window over the harbour had a latch that moved without any noise at all, because somebody had been putting oil into it. "He sat here," Piet said. He had not touched anything. "Somebody sat here for a long time, and the dust knows where they put their elbows, and the lamp is still in the desk, and the window still opens. This is not a room that was locked in 1996. This is a room somebody used." Tove looked at the clean rectangle, and then at the sixth table, which had no dust on it at all. He came round that table fast. "Don't." There was a brown envelope taped to the underside of the top with four strips of old gummed tape gone brown, and the tape had been lifted and re-laid more than once. They got it down with the flat end of a table lamp. Inside was a single leaf of paper, torn out of a bound ledger along a stubbed edge, and it carried a column of four signatures in fountain pen, and under the signatures, in pencil, in the same small careful hand that had been leaving notes in a tide pool for eleven months: Tell Ole the next one is for him. Do not open anything until I am in the room. ---